


Shards

by ailixandrite2dot0 (AILiSeki)



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Morbid themes, Pink Diamond’s “Death” (Steven Universe)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:02:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23617957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AILiSeki/pseuds/ailixandrite2dot0
Summary: A secret moment after Pink’s shattering.
Relationships: Blue Diamond & Yellow Diamond (Steven Universe)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	Shards

Shards

It was dark and raining. Stupid Earth atmosphere. Yellow Diamond didn’t want to be on the surface of that miserable planet, especially not now, but she had to.

There was Blue Diamond, soaked, digging her fingers through the mud, piling up small pink shards. Weeping, sobbing. She looked nothing like a Diamond right now. She looked pathetic. It was painful for Yellow to see her like this.

“Blue, stop it.” She said, firmly but trying to sound kind.

“I have to find every piece…” Blue whispered. “I have to find her…”

“That’s not her anymore.” Yellow sighed. “We can’t bring her back.”

“I know. I know.” Blue said, her voice heartbroken and heartbreaking to Yellow. “But we can’t leave her here. What if the rebels get their hands on her?”

_They already did_ , Yellow bitterly thought.

Blue sobbed loudly. “She is hurting, Yellow. Imagine how it feels to not be whole. She must be so scared… we can’t leave her like this!”

Yellow looked at the small pile of shards and thought about these words. She had never given a lot of thought on death before, that was a luxury her kind had. Diamonds were thought to be so powerful that, despite having the same vulnerability as any common Pebble or Pearl, they were thought to be immortal. And they certainly did live as if they were immortal.

Yet, death in general was not a stranger in Yellow’s life. She handled personally the executions in her court. The deaths of common gems didn’t mean a lot to her. They were easily replaced by others just like them, who did the same work, and life went on.

Yellow knew what shattering did to a gem. Everything they were, the mechanisms that allowed them to manifest a body and all the data of their memories and personality, everything was stored inside their gems. Any crack, any chipping could irreversibly damage all of it. A shattered gem was just a pile of shards too small to contain enough data to know who the gem used to be. They could try to form a partial body, and they would for as long as they had the energy to do so, trying to fulfill a purpose they knew only a fragment of. Yellow never thought of those shards as suffering, but their struggle was a sad thing to watch.

“Help me, Yellow!” Blue begged her. “Please.”

It was useless. No matter how long they spent in that mud, they would never find every shard. Some of them would be too small for them to even see.

Yellow sat down on the ground and held Blue’s wrists. “Stop it. There’s nothing we can do.”

“She is hurting!” Blue sobbed. “The least we can do right now is to bubble her remains!”

A bubble? And have inside of it forever a reminder of what they lost? Yellow couldn’t handle the idea.

She raised her hand to the pile Blue had gathered and hit it with a small blast of lightning. It reduced the shards to dust.

It hurt, but it shouldn’t. Those weren’t her, they were simple fragments of what she used to be. None of those shards knew how to be Pink, and even if they could be put together they would still not be Pink. If they were in pain, the logical solution was to make them small enough so they didn’t know how to feel pain.

Blue didn’t seem to think the same. “Yellow!” She exclaimed, horrified.

“They’re not her, Blue.” She said softly. “She is gone. And now, she can’t feel pain anymore.”

Blue sobbed loudly, but she didn’t protest. Yellow wanted to believe she understood her logic. She embraced her fellow Diamond, feeling tears in her own eyes too.

They didn’t have the luxury of not thinking of death anymore. From then on, they would be thinking a lot about it. 

**Author's Note:**

> This idea randomly came to me finished yesterday. I remembered some old discussions about gem culture on death, from long before we knew about Pink Diamond, and all the speculation on where Pink’s shards could be.
> 
> This is a question that I still wonder about: why does it seem like the other Diamonds didn’t collect Pink’s fake shards? I specially wonder it after seeing Yellow doing the thing in Homeworld Bound (though I think the answer in this case is probably that Yellow had no idea that was a thing that could be done until that point).
> 
> The way Blue clings to everything that used to belong to Pink makes me believe that she would want to have her shards even if there was nothing that could be done. Yellow seem to be more the kind of person who doesn’t want any reminder of what hurts her nearby. I also don’t disagree with her logic here. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Please share your thoughts on the subject, I have seen some neat stuff done in fics and I would love to know what you guys think about this small hc and what could possibly have happened in canon!


End file.
